There was a little man, and he had a little gun,
And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead;
He went to the brook, and he saw a little duck,
And he shot it through the head, head, head.
—Mother Goose
Four decades ago, Harry Dietrich,1 a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' newly established Accident Prevention Committee, described a developmentally based approach to the prevention of childhood injury. Dietrich stressed the great need for protection ("passive immunization") for the young child and for safety education ("active immunization") as the child matures. It was also in the early 1950s that George Wheatley, the first chairman of the Accident Prevention Committee, popularized the "three E's"2—education, enforcement, and engineering—as a framework for developing and categorizing strategies to prevent injuries.